Recently the paid vs. natural link discussion seemed to get some attention (again, sigh…). I couldn’t agree more with Ross, who questions whether paid link equals evil black-hat and organic link equals praiseworthy white-hat SEO equations.

When it comes to link building, the white/black-hat terminology is confusing. Just have a look at some of the link building techniques I use for my employer - a multi-billion jewelry retailer with online stores in 20+ countries worldwide. Bear in mind that we are talking about a huge brand, which in many ways is tremendously helpful and makes link building kind of easy - our SEO challenges are rather on-site than off-site!

Press releases

Frequently we issue press releases, which get picked up by virtually every news site, and then by the relevant blogger’s and so on. A ton of organic links in other words, we even have a big influence on what anchor texts are used. Purely white-hat I’d say.

Opinion leaders

We monitor what’s going on in social media, forums and in the blogosphere. There’s pretty affordable software for that, which makes it easy to spot opinion leaders and influencers in the industry. And we treat them according to their status: they get new products for free for example. And naturally they write (read: link) about our products. Already a bit light grey-hat here? I mean, one can buy people not only with money…

Here’s a personal example: Just recently I “paid” SEOmoz with a special edition of my spot the difference game to tweet about it. I invested some time in it too, and time is money. Grey-hat too?

Affiliate marketing

As a big retailer we also have many affiliates who make up for a good percentage of our online revenues. They promote our products, using creatives (e.g. text links) we provide and getting performance-based commissions in return. Now isn’t this black-hat? We pay our affiliates to link to us, after all!

In my opinion the above techniques are totally legit and common practice. Yet they involve some form of payment, some more direct than others. So whenever you are not sure whether to buy links or not, ask yourself how well the links fit in the context of the linking sites. If they’re on-topic and add value to the respective sites’ visitors, you should be fine. To close I'll quote Ross Hudgens’ post: “Instead, SEO as an entity should move towards describing what is now called ‘paid links’ or ‘non-paid links’ and rephrase it as a dichotomy of disruptive links or non-disruptive links.”